Robbed hit of the week 2/14/22 - John Michael Montgomery's "Home To You"...

 

 

"Home To You" - John Michael Montgomery

from the album Home To You (1999)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #45 (two weeks)

 

This week's 'robbed hit' comes from John Michael Montgomery, who was one of the biggest country music stars in the 1990s before finally landing his first crossover top-40 "pop" hit on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in the beginning of 1999 with "Hold On To Me". In the spring of that year, John returned with his sixth studio album Home To You. The lead single, "Hello L.O.V.E.", was an uptempo traditional-style shuffle that was quite earnest (and sounded like a Joe Diffie retread), but it stopped short on Billboard's Country Singles chart at #15, while stalling down at #71 on the Hot 100. Montgomery then went back to his love ballad wheelhouse for the follow-up, "Home To You". Written by Sara Light and Arlos Smith, the song is about life on the road, and the love that awaits him at home. The verse does have more than a passing resemblance to Bob Dylan's "To Make You Feel My Love", but the chorus does elevate it a bit, as John's sweet vocals deliver the platitudes with the right amount of emotive restraint. The music video does a good job of setting three scenarios the lyrics could be referring to as well...

While "Home To You" returned Montgomery to the Country Singles top ten, spending a week at #2, the song stopped a handful of notches below the top-40 on the crossover Hot 100 in December of 1999. Internationally, the single went to #8 on the Canadian country chart. The Home To You album, released in May of that year, got to #135 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and #16 on the Country Albums list. 

The third single from Home To You, the sermonizing Waylon Jennings song "Nothing Catches Jesus By Surprise", stiffed, becoming his first promoted single to miss the Country Singles Top-40 at #50. That was followed by the upbeat "You Are" (not the Lionel Richie song), which didn't do much better at #48  on the Country chart. 

(7/10)